This is a story about love, hate and Mark Twain. The object of Twain’s desire (then resentment): the typewriter. Twain first laid eyes on a “newfangled typing machine,” as he called it, sometime in the early 1870s. He was, by then, on his way to becoming the world’s most famous writer and humorist. At the same time, the tools of writing were undergoing a profound transformation — from fountain pens, with their leaking and smudging ink, to the pleasant sound of tapping a key whose corresponding letter was magically stamped to paper. The new technology did not emerge with the […]
